Of course, some rogue landlords will always discriminate. People like Fergus Wilson, for example, who said he didn’t want to rent to ‘coloured people’ because they made his houses ‘smell of curry’.

We would expect our political leaders to condemn this, but instead they are actively encouraging it through the ‘right to rent’ scheme and conscripting private landlords into an ad hoc, untrained, and unsupported Border Force.

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Those who don’t conduct document checks on foreign nationals risk five years in prison and unlimited fines.

Landlords understandably, want to rent their properties as quickly as possible to anyone who can pay the rent and who will create the fewest problems for them down the line.

Having to look at complicated papers, which often have nothing to do with immigration status, and wonder whether they’re fake or not takes time.

It’s not just foreign nationals who lose out. Ethnic minority British people will find it harder to get houses as a result too if they can’t show a passport.

Waiting for the Home Office to respond to a query about someone’s status takes time.

Having to find a new tenant because the Home Office mistakenly serves a notice on you telling you that they are now disqualified from renting… all of this takes time.

So what doesn’t take time? Renting to people who can show a British passport.

Something which is easy to recognise, to check for validity and guaranteed not to change in future, or cause any problems.

The government claims all the checks required are simple, but they can’t even come up with a comprehensive database of just the EU identity documents that would be acceptable. It would be too difficult and expensive.

And landlords aren’t buying it.

Survey after survey, whether it’s our own, conducted by Shelter, or the Residential Landlords Association, show that because of the right to rent checks landlords will prefer to rent to those with British passports because it’s safer that way.

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It’s not just foreign nationals who lose out. Ethnic minority British people will find it harder to get houses as a result too if they can’t show a passport.

Our mystery shopping shows that even where landlords don’t discriminate against a non-white person if they have a British passport, they will if they claim to be British but can only show other papers.

The main lesson of Windrush was that creating a hostile environment for ‘illegal’ immigrants inevitably creates a hostile environment for anyone suspected of being foreign.

The hostile environment doesn’t work.

Today Javid is paying lawyers to fight us in court because he doesn’t want to conduct a review into whether the landlord immigration checks he is imposing work or not, and investigate the discrimination they’re causing.

As people from abroad and those who ‘look foreign’ find parts of the rental market closing off to them, he is choosing to bury his head in the sand. Truly, nothing has changed.